You know, I love Visio to develop simple databases and I have written a Visio add-in that performs the forward engineer of data models, called Visio Forward Engineer. Now I have found some time to update the project to version 1.1. You can download the add-in from the SQLBI website here.

The most important fix is that now it can be installed on computers without Visual Studio. Moreover, there are some features and limitations that I would like to share, just to answer the many questions I receive by e-mail about the project:

  • The tool is free and provided with full source code.
  • There is no support for calculated columns… sorry, but it cannot be added.
  • The primary key index is always crated as CLUSTERED, due to some limitation in the Visio library.
  • If you use a dot in the table name, as in “accounting.customers”, the add-in will automatically create the schema accounting and add the table to that schema. I find this simple feature very useful.
  • You can now add some SQL code to the generated script, useful for creation of views or other SQL objects. The default name of this code file is the same as the Visio with “SQL Code” appended at the end, as you can see in the figure

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Happy downloading. Sorriso